Quote from comp.object

"A typical SQL DBMS requires _drastically_ faster hardware than a
hierarchical database to provide even roughly equivalent response time
-- to the point that a SQL DBMS running on current hardware is about
the
same speed (or slighthly slower) than a hierarchical database was
around
25 years ago, running on hardware that was current at the time.

As far as normalization goes: back then, normalization was a way of
life
-- normalization reduces redundancy, and given the cost of storage at
the time, redundancy was _expensive_ (even ignoring inflation, one
month's rent on a 1.8 GB disk drive in 1982 would buy enough disks for
quite a large RAID today). "